William Sewell’s Logics of History works its way towards a really useful understanding of the concept of an “event”. He defines the event primarily as a rupture in ongoing structures, a moment where something new and unexpected becomes possible, but where that rupture is also circumscribed by the structures it arose out of and is to some extent explained by them. E.g., the rupture happens where a keen observer of those structures might have expected it to happen, but once it happens, all sorts of things are in motion and all sorts of changes are possible.
Sewell’s conception of the event is somewhat at odds with the way a daily newspaper records events. Much of the time, an event in the news is really just an increment, a sort of steady ‘ping’ on a temporal radar indicating the presence of structure. This drives a lot of us wild because when the event is a bad one that we believe does not have to happen, we want it to be a rupture—or we want to turn it into a rupture in Sewell’s sense. We want the world to break right open and have something new spill out.
Look at the news this week. A shooting at Michigan State. That’s an increment, not an event. It’s a rupture for the dead and the families of the dead and the people who lived in fear for hours of being among the dead. For the United States, it’s just another recurrence. The structure of mass shooting goes on. Those of us who want something to change keep thinking: the next one will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The next one will be the one where we finally say enough. The next one will the real event. And it never is. That’s not for lack of trying by activists, by frustrated citizens, by everyone who isn’t a worshipper at the shrine of the gun. It is not that we keep losing: it is that there is something deep and persistent and structural whose rupture point will have to be something more profound than another mass shooting.
More scientific findings about the ominous future of Antarctica’s ice shelves. When that quite physical rupture comes, maybe it will be a real event. But news of its probable arrival is just an increment, just as each storm and fire and drought and flood is. Again, we dream and scheme of how to make a rupture before the world does it to us with some catastrophic finality. West Antarctica alone could make the sea rise by 10 feet over a few thousand years. The findings announced today are actually a less momentous increment than many other stories—almost a hopeful story—but against a backdrop of accelerating disaster everywhere all at once.
The debt grows and we head into the usual cycle of the people who spent money heedlessly suddenly deciding they are fiscally responsible and must cut deeply into social spending to prove it. The people determined to destroy democracy keep at it even as democratic elections repudiate them. We keep expecting the event in the sense of daily news to deliver us: this time something will change. Hearts and minds will shift, the sleepers will awake, the silent will cry out. Mad as hell and at last not going to take it anymore.
Every day, social media seethes with people who think they can push an ordinary event into a rupture through issuing commandments and calls to action. The newspapers and TV reporters and columnists ask: is this is at last? Or wonder, can we make it a real event? People throw soup at paintings, embrace boycotts, march and demonstrate, write to Congress, give donations. Anything to alchemically transform the tick of an increment into the possibility of change. Or in a few cases, to undo a rupture—to turn an event like January 6th back into the incremental march of procedural justice and the restoration of the institutions, to turn the crazed indecency of Ron DeSantis burning down his own state just to show his fellow arsonists how unafraid he is of the inferno back into the ordinary bullshit of culture war.
All of it is a kind of attempt to propitiate the gods of change, chance and possibility so that they will free us from the increment. There are so many rocks we are chained to like Andromeda, waiting to be devoured. Sewell’s sense of event seems like the only way our chains could be broken, the only way we could dance away from structures that produce horrible news drip by drip by drip. But as Sewell observes in his analysis of the fall of the Bastille as the seeming heart of the initial ruptures of the French Revolution, unpredictability is just that. The event is unpredictable even on the eve of its arrival and then unleashes more profound unpredictability in the heart of its occurrence. The moment that makes the difference on paper in this case, the fall of the Bastille, doesn’t seem as if it ought to have been the key that turned the lock. It couldn’t be made to be that rupture by forethought and design, but it was made to be that in hindsight after it had happened, through meaning-making.
So no wonder we swarm like ants over the picnic of the daily news, hoping to interpret our way into a dramatic change. The wonder is, perhaps, that we aren’t more afraid than we are of what might happen if we succeeded.
Image credit: "Color Manipulation Red Blue - Überlegungen Farbe Sanguine Blau - The Storming of the Bastille Pris de la Bastille Sturm auf die Bastille. (Houel 1789)" by hedbavny is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.